


Real Enough

by uumuu



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Body Horror, Implied/Referenced Character Death, No Dialogue, Other, Pregnancy, Sculpture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 05:15:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8388679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: Nerdanel sculpts a statue of Fëanor, but that's only the beginning.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/gifts).



She didn't remember when or how she had decided to sculpt Fëanáro. A sudden inspiration, a moment's spark was her best guess. Or maybe the idea had brewing inside her, unheeded, for longer than she was ready to admit.

She worked in an old shed that had been the storehouse for Fëanáro's smithy. The shed had been emptied after the Darkening, but no-one had felt any need to tear it down, as the smithy had been torn down: the shed had not seen Fëanáro at work. She had a large marble block carried there and set upright on a low platform. She patiently ate away at it to coax an image of her former husband out of it, a keen satisfaction simmering inside her to be sculpting something different from the fanciful shapes she had sculpted by the dozen after the Darkening. Adherence to reality had seemed out of place, after the Darkening.

Her father came only once to the shed, watched her devote herself completely to her work and crossed his arms over his chest, his fingers digging in his the sleeves of his shirt. His face crinkled, lines of hurt and worry fanning out on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. Then he turned, without saying a word, and left her to her honing of details and her polishing. 

Now the scaffolding around the statue had been dismantled, and Fëanáro stood on the platform, as tall as he had been in life, the musculature, face and expression as precise as Nerdanel remembered them.

She was arranging her tools in their box after washing them – scalpels and chisels lined neatly next to one another like a row of long teeth – when an arm wrapped around her waist, hard and thick. A memory flashed in her mind – Fëanáro liked to surprise her when she finished her work. He would wrap both arms around her and hold her, whispering praise or cheerful nonsense in her sweaty hair, kissing it. She used to joke that Tyelcormo had been born with silver hair and near-white eyes because she had been staring too long at marble on the day he was conceived. 

She was dragged back to the present, inside her body by the pallor of the arm encircling her. She recognised the streaks in it, she had memorised them while she polished the marble, reworked the curve of the muscles and tendons in the upper arm, and polished it again. The statue's other arm had started undoing the lacings of her work clothes, nimble as if it knew exactly where they were and how they were fastened. It ripped her bloomers and a second hardness pressed against her bare crotch.

Blindly, she grabbed a scalpel and thrust in the arm holding her in place, but it didn't even scratch the marble, and skipped down on the table. 

She was still unbalanced when the statue pulled her back towards itself and slipped the hardness between her vaginal lips. She was penetrated deeply, a long stiff shaft of impossible cold tearing through her. Her mouth fell open. She wanted to scream, but all her body seemed able to manage was a sickening shudder around the thing inside her. The statue pulled back and slammed back in. Her hips hit the table, once and again when the statue repeated the motion in the exact same way as the first time, and again and again.

Thrust after thrust made her tools rattle in her box. She tried to focus on the sound not to focus on the cock splitting her open and dragging against her dry walls, on its blunt head hitting her womb, on the weight of the thing behind her. She tried to brace herself, but she didn't have the strength to match the force of the assault.

Her knees buckled as soon as the statue let her go, and she collapsed onto the ground, wetness sticking to her legs. 

When she had gathered the strength to turn, the statue was back on its pedestal, as if it had never moved.

*

She convinced herself everything had been a mere bad dream, even though her body bore the signs of the violence – bruises on her hips and a burning in her sex. Perhaps it was a wicked way of her body and of her soul to tell her that it had been wrong of her to sculpt the statue in the first place. 

Sculpting that statue had been a poor decision, unwise. Aulë's warnings had proven true. Námo had told her he would never come back. She shouldn't have tried to make images of him. She would break the statue, grind the marble to dust, never ever think of Fëanáro again if necessary. What good would it do her, him, anyone?

The night before she had to leave for Tirion on a work-related trip, she went to the shed, carrying a heavy hammer. The statue stood in the middle of the large room, light draping on its back like cloak made of spider-silk. Fitting raiment for such fine work. The lips had been moulded to a gentle curve – not a smile not a grimace but the subtle, inscrutable grin that had often graced Fëanáro's lips – the hair looked as satiny as newly spun silk. The left arm was bent at the elbow, the hand reaching out towards the viewer; the right arm was parallel to the body, the hand curled into a fist, with the knuckles standing out paler than the rest of hand. 

She circled the statue once, holding the hammer in both hands, slowly assessing it from every direction, as if she could have found the key for what had ( _not_ ) happened hid in the littlest details only her eyes were aware of. When she came to stand at its left side, she swung the hammer towards the arm that had held her, but her stroke rebounded off the marble. The failed blow reverberated up her arms. The hammer fell from her hands, narrowly missing her feet.

The statue sprang to life in an instant and as abruptly grabbed her wrists. 

She was tossed to the ground. Her head collided sharply with the floor, leaving her stunned. Instinctively, she lifted her arms, but it was not to push the statue away. With the blow to her head, even Telperion's light was blinding, steel-sharp on sheeny marble, far far too bright. She heard her clothes ripping, and the statue was between her legs. The same thick, icy hardness pressed against her opening, shoved inside. Disgust surged in her womb. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed the assault would be over soon. But it didn't. It went on and on, the thrusts coming steadily, always with the same force.

When her vision cleared, she dared to look at statue, lowering her arms to her chest. 

Pupil-less eyes and an unchanging expression loomed over her. She was relieved, in a way. The statue had nothing of Fëanáro save his outline. Perfection is so cold, too regular, and Fëanáro had been the very opposite of that. The thrusts were mechanical, measured, like scalpel-strokes, as if the statue were trying to carve her the same way she had carven it. But why would it? Why, why, why, how – 

She passed out before she could even begin thinking of an answer, and awoke in her bed. 

*

Large tufts of grass had grown on the pathway to the storehouse, and a heap of dirt and wrinkled leaves had gathered before the door. Work had kept her away from her father's house for longer than she had anticipated, but now she stood only a few steps from the shed. Her mother had warned her against returning there. Her mother was right – it would have been best to forget that the statue existed. Her father had told her he would send some of his apprentices to dispose of it. Both knew her well enough to understand that there was something amiss with her, and that it had to do with the making of the statue. 

But the making was _hers_ , and she couldn't just turn her back on it, let someone else undo it. 

She opened the door, swept bare feet through the rubbish littering the doorway. Some of the dead leaves were ushered in by a sudden breeze, then creaking loudly – wailing – the door fell shut in the wind's face. 

The statue stood placid in the middle of the room. It couldn't be Fëanáro. It couldn't be a ghost, either. Ghosts were unheard of in Aman. When she tried to hint at the topic to one of Niënna's maiar, she had reassured her that houseless fëar would not be left to wander the land. Could her own desires have given life to the statue, desires unknown even to her heart? Or perhaps she had finally done it. 'Your statues look so lifelike they could just start walking' had always been a compliment, praise which emboldened her. Perhaps, it had turned into a curse now.

The statue waited, as if giving her enough time to realise that there was no answer to her questions, not even in its presence. And then it moved. 

This time she let it do, too tired to even attempt to fight back. Besides, it was too late already. The statue seemed to sense the change in her. It lifted her, and carried her towards the table, this time clean of any tools. Her nightgown didn't need ripping or unlacing. When the statue entered her, she wrapped her legs around it. 

It hurt, like the first two times, and she still hated it. The statue's thrusts made her body jolt and her neck, which was bent at a sharp angle, hurt every time it was squished back against the wall. 

But it was too late already. 

“I'm pregnant,” she breathed softly, almost pleadingly, over the squelching between her legs, “I'm pregnant.” She felt tears fall down the sides of her face, drawing a trajectory similar to that of her hands, even if the direction was the opposite as her hands rose to cradle her belly. 

The statue was the only one she could tell that secret to. 

But the statue couldn't hear.

*

Her womb swelled, but not too prominently, and she didn't have a hard time concealing the bulge. It was her only consolation: the bulge was heavy, heavier than any of her babies had been, heavy as if she had been carrying a grown elf inside her. 

Naked in front of the large body mirror in her room, she looked at her reflection, at her profile, drawing her hand up and down her belly.

She wondered what exactly it was growing inside her. Whenever she came back after visiting the statue, the wetness between her legs was only her own. She would scrape her fingers in her loosened opening and licked her harvest off of them. Other than the fact that it was uncannily cold, the fluid she swallowed tasted only as female juices did.

Sometimes she dreamt she gave birth to all of her sons again, one after the other, until she was left gaping open, emptied of everything. On other nights, she gave birth to Fëanáro himself, all grown-up with no childhood for him to bewail, and she struggled, her whole body taut, to push him out of her, tall and broad and hefty, until he dangled from between her legs like a dead thing, his feet still inside her. 

Every morning she devised plans to get rid of the thing growing inside her. Perhaps disposing of the statue would be enough to undo both. She just had to ask her father. By nightfall, her resolution withered alongside her strength, and when she let herself fall on her bed, after visiting the statue for the last time every time, she turned to the thing inside her – moving, pulsating, living. 

The unmistakable pains signalling imminent birth gripped her much sooner than a normal pregnancy would have warranted. Her thoughts went to the statue when the excruciating pangs wrenched her from a nap in the dead hours of night, sweat-drenched. She had to see it, she had to be there when she gave birth. Whatever was about to be born had no place in her room, in her father's house. A storm raged in the garden, but she went out all the same, wrapping herself in a shawl. 

She collapsed as soon as she stepped inside the hut, water and sweat dripping all around her as if her whole body were crying. She screamed the moment whatever had been growing inside her stretched her vagina to get out. The rest dropped out of her almost painlessly. It might have been screaming but she didn't hear it. She didn't even turn to look at it. The umbilical cord fell from her on its own. Relieved, she staggered to her feet. Rain and sweat had dried on her body. She felt empty yet heavy, melting away yet solidly smooth. 

She wobbled towards the statue, holding her arms out to it. 

*

Late the next morning, when nobody had seen Nerdanel anywhere, Mahtan finally went to look for his daughter in the shed, even though he had to force himself every step of the way just to head there. 

He didn't find her. 

A tiny puddle of something dark and viscous filled a depression in the uneven tiles of the floor. Damp clothing was strewn all the way to the platform. On the platform itself, there was no longer a standing statue but a group of two people, a man and a woman, hugging each other, melded into one.

**Author's Note:**

> Your prompt made me think of E.M. Forster's "Classical Annex" - this is a darker take on the idea.


End file.
